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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Techonomy: Changing How the World Learns

Almost everyone agrees that technology has the potential to change education, but there are so many different approaches that it's often hard to figure out which technologies really work and which ones are just hype. At the Techonomy conference this week, an interesting roundtable on changing how the world learns brought together a number of entrepreneurs and even a young student to talk about the technology and what it can do.

In an earlier conversion, Osman Rashid of Kno told me he thought the tipping point for electronic textbooks would be the start of the 2013 school year, as the basic textbooks now exist and many districts have already done pilot programs. He expects digital textbooks to account for 25 percent of the textbook market in the U.S. by the end of 2015, with many school districts adopting BYOD policies. I was curious about the pricing model, and Rashid said the idea is that textbooks could cost about $10 per year, which is one-sixth of the cost of a physical textbook. This won't save money because school districts don't replace physical books each year, but it will provide other advantages of electronic textbooks, including interactivity and frequent updates.

At the session, Tara Lemmey of Net Power and Light, which makes the Spin collaborative computing platform, talked about how, in some cases, small group classes can work much better than the "sage on the stage" model that used to be prevalent. When kids learn collaboratively, they can excel, she said.

Kennedy Shine, a young student, said teachers do a great job of teaching the main concepts, but that she can learn more from having friends teach her how to do things. For instance, she learned to play Minecraft in part from YouTube. She said you can learn real-world skills from games, and said she thought games could be a part of the learning environment. (In the Minecraft environment, you often have kids building environments for other kids, moderator Gary Bolles of eParachute explained.)

DimensionU is coming at education from a gaming perspective, with multiplayer educational games. "Think Halo without the violence," said founder Nt Etuk. This builds engagement and is also more efficient because it gives kids an incentive to help other kids. While some have been worried about the "signal-to-noise" ratio inherent in games, he said in game models, students learn how to play on their own. (One issue Etuk mentioned was that there are challenges in delivering communities for children under 13 in the U.S. because of restrictions not letting the children communicate freely with each other.)

Minh Nguyen of Syllabuster talked about his company's upcoming platform. For a long time, teachers could put a syllabus up on the Web easily, but they needed a platform that takes into account how the curriculum changes over time.

One key factor that a number of the participants discussed was analytics. Kno's Rashid said data is very important, with evidence that more engagement is a good indicator of performance. For instance, without grading, the platform can tell the different between an A student and a C student. The data can be used for a range for things, from assessments to analytics.

Edward Hanapole of Kaplan, Inc., the large test preparation company, talked about how the company needs to change to meet the requirements of students today. "Digital natives" already have expectations of how they want to work and learn in a digital age, so Kaplan is trying to adapt to those needs. He described how there is a whole value chain for education, and said the company's challenge is to deliver a highly interactive experience that students want but also the skills that matter. This doesn't necessarily need to be the most efficient method of education, but rather something that the students like, as long as it delivers the skills.

Lemmey said it is important to separate learning from mastery, saying we should be driving insight and learning, and then separate out the measurement and the evaluation. She thinks sometimes we're overly focused on analytics, while Kaplan's Hanapole said you need some level of measurement to figure out what is working. He noted that in education, new things are often introduced into a curriculum before we know whether they are going to work, which is why measurement is so important.

One interesting side discussion was on the importance of simulation. Hanapole explained how simulation is helping the Baltimore Ravens NFL team. Most of the participants were positive about the benefits of such simulations, but Lemmey did note that simulating all of the physicality of "bits to atom" is hard. In general, she said it is important to remember that simulation is not the real world, and while simulation can be very useful, it is better to use a compendium of tools, including simulation and real hands-on work.

Change will come from both sides, Rashid said, from inside and outside the educational system. Parents will bring in electronic versions of the physical textbooks and try to influence teachers to move there. He said he expects the demand from outside the system to happen more over the next 24 months.

An audience member said the problem is that teachers are not "digital natives." Rashid agreed that teachers below 45 are adapting the new technology much faster than older teachers, but said this will change over time. Lemmey talked about "teachers teaching other teachers" as key method of distributing this technology.

In summary, the members of the roundtable were very hopeful about the new technology, and I'd have to agree. Still, I do agree with Hanapole and others that we need to measure the results to see what works and what doesn't.

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